Heavenly Rewards
by elenathehun
Summary: [MiraExile] Sometimes, doing the best you can is good enough.


The day I write something normal is the day my head falls off, to paraphrase my mother. Still, why did I write this, again? Why? Oh, that's right. Because when people say, "Gee, Elena, would you mind writing me X/Y? It's never been done before," I'm more likely to say yes than no. Done for Son Kenshin, for he has discovered my weakness!

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The last time Mira had seen the Jedi Exile, she'd been nineteen years old and he had just saved the galaxy.

That might seem rather romantic, but it wasn't, not really. They were in hyperspace and the _Ebon Hawk_ was falling apart around them, and everybody looked like they were going to die, especially him. Malachor V was behind them, and Force-knew-what was ahead of them, and Mira's head really, really hurt. Really. Hanharr had thrown her around a bit before she managed to defeat him, and the Handmaiden's right eye was all bloody and gory, and Atton looked like a whore who'd met the wrong kind of customer one late night, and, and, and she didn't even know where Visas and Bao-Dur _were_.

Her head really hurt.

The Exile crawled over to her, covered in blood, and held her face in his hands. "Sleep, Mira," he whispered, and she tried to shake off the compulsion, tried to stay awake, but it was too late, too strong. Too much.

The last thing she thought was simply a wordless feeling of anger. Mira didn't like people pushing her around.

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When Mira woke up, she was on Citadel Station and everyone was gone except for Bao-Dur. It took a while for that to penetrate her muzzy brain, but when it did, there was hell to pay. She ranted and raved and screamed weakly at Bao-Dur that it couldn't be true, just couldn't, he wouldn't abandon them like this, and he took the whole tirade silently, whether because of her weakness or because he just didn't care Mira didn't know.

When she was finished and could do nothing more than stare at the ceiling and pant heavily with exertion, Bao-Dur told her in his quiet, deliberate way that the Exile – the General – had taken the surviving droids and the Ebon Hawk and had left the Known Regions, probably forever. Atton and the Handmaiden – Brianna – hadn't even bothered searching for him because there was no point to it. Instead, they had gone down to Atris's Academy and destroyed the Sith relics, gathering the few uncorrupted Jedi pieces scattered amidst the rot.

They were on Dantooine, the Zabrak said, combing through the ruins of the Enclave for remnants. He didn't add that they went to give the dead Jedi whose bones rested there a proper burial. Bao-Dur didn't tell her a lot of things.

The doctors told her what Bao-Dur couldn't: the only reason she had slept so long was because of the compulsion laid onto her. The Exile had forgotten that people with concussions should try to stay awake, and by sending her to sleep, he had sent her into a coma.

He had almost killed her.

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When Atton and Brianna came back from Dantooine, Mira was well enough to travel with them to Coruscant and the Jedi Temple. It was from them that she learned Visas had left with the Mandalore, traveling back to her dead and destroyed world. In the years that followed, Mira often wondered what happened to the strange Miralukan woman, if she had found any measure of peace.

She never found out.

Nor did she see Bao-Dur again after leaving Citadel Station. The Jedi consumed her life after that, and he had no place in it. By the time she made her way back to Citadel some five years after she'd seen him for the last time, he was long gone, the specter of his rage and guilt having chased him onward to another source of atonement, another path to redemption. Ever after, Mira could not think of the man without a taste of acid welling up from her stomach. She had forgotten, in her long rants to him about the Exile's abandonment, that it had not been the first time Bao-Dur had been abandoned, nor the last.

Guilt is a heavy stone.

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And now, it's all come down to this: a puny, insignificant world of puny, insignificant inhabitants who don't even value their own lives, let alone their freedom. Mira _does_, though, and because of this, she is dying. She thinks, wryly, that she was a fool to be attempting political assassination at her age, but there is no real self-recrimination in her thoughts.

She has led a good life, the best she is able. There's nothing else she could have done. She closes her eyes…

And when she opens them again, she's nineteen, hair still red and eyes still green. She's not on the Ebon Hawk, though, or anyplace she's ever been before. It's new and different and _indescribable_, and it's with some sense of relief that she sees the Exile standing some distance away, looking not a day older than when she last saw him. Somehow Mira knows that she's far older than him, though, and she wonders how his life ended, out there in the Unknown Regions.

"Hey," she says quietly, nodding her head at him. "Long time no see."

He just grins at her, and she thinks she sees a wink.

She just shakes her head and laughs. "You haven't changed a bit."

Neither, in the end, has she.


End file.
